Best Playwright

Edward Albee

Oh, we are the lucky ones. Thanks to the University of Houston, Edward Albee, who is arguably the greatest living American playwright, chooses to grace our fair city with his presence some four months out of the year. Even better, the Alley Theatre often produces one of his astonishing plays while he's in town. This January, the theater decided to do two -- both of them Tony-winners. Upstairs, on the main stage, bitter betrayal was being soothed by highballs of whiskey in Albee's classic Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Downstairs, on the Neuhaus Stage, the playwright's newest script, The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?, was busy astonishing audiences in an entirely new way -- only a writer of Albee's ability could pen a successful play about an architect who falls in love with a barnyard animal. The medicine of Albee's haunting imagination continues to remind us that love is always the most dangerous territory.